Horace Russell, Contributor

Living as most of us do in the shadow of the United States and its news media, it is easy to forget that there are other religious groups in the Fertile Crescent besides Jews and Muslims.

There has been a Christian community present since the time of Jesus and their evangelistic zeal spread Christianity across the Roman Empire in just three centuries. That spread included what is now called the Arab world. I recall the consternation on people's faces when they read that Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq was a Christian. It now comes as a surprise to many to learn from the Latin American and European media that the churches in Israel and in Palestine are suing for peace.

The politics of the region has so long been posited as a faith issue between Islam and Christianity that the pluralism of these great faiths as well as the presence of other faith traditions, like Bahai has been overlooked.

There is nothing new about pluralism in the region. Even a cursory examination of the data from the sacred texts and archaeology suggest that pluralism has existed in the Fertile Crescent for millennia. Apart from Babylonian religion centred in what is now Iraq, there were Persian religions (Iran) Assyrian religions (Syria, Jordan), farther north by the Black Sea were the Scythians and southward the Egyptian and Nubian religions. They all vied to be heard and believed in this narrow Asia-African region and, of course, Islam was later to rise in what is now Saudi Arabia.

Faith traditions

It was against this background that Judaism and its variant Christianity developed. Both were to be affected by the success of Alexander the Great in imposing the Greek language upon this same region. A comparison between the faith traditions in Samaria and Jerusalem with that in Alexandria bears this out. We are still indebted to Hellenisation for the works of Josephus, the Septuagint as well as the wisdom of Philo, the philosopher.

In the time of Jesus there were several strains of Judaism. There were the Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees Zealots and the Essenes. It is common practice in reading of these groups to ignore that they were faith traditions. Indeed even the codification of the Law had at least two Talmudic traditions, one in Jerusalem and the other in Babylon. While there were some basic agreed tenets there were also significant divergences.

The Pharisees and Sadducees for instance did not agree on resurrection or the primary emphasis of the worship experience. It was within this plurality that Jesus lived and Christianity was born.

The sayings of Jesus are similar to the beliefs of the Pharisees but not the Sadducees and perhaps that is why a bitter rivalry is recorded between the Jesus sect and the Pharisees in the Gospels. Ironically, the greatest exponent of the Jesus faith was himself a Pharisee.

The comparatively recent discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in Qumran stimulated a debate on the origins of Christianity, which has been re-ignited by the novel The Da Vinci Code, and the publication of the Gospel of Judas by National Geographic to coincide with Easter, this year. While from Qumran it is clear that the Essenes were conservative and exclusive from the Gospels it appears that the Jesus Faith was radical and inclusive. Still as the Jesus Way developed in Christianity there was a constant struggle between a conservative Judaic tradition and the Jesus Way. The Acts of the Apostles (esp.15) is replete with examples as well as the Pauline letters.

The Jesus Way

However, the New Testament the corpus of the Jesus Way does not escape the current pluralistic tendencies of that age. There are four Gospels with differing emphases. It is understandable that there would be a commonality in the Pauline letters. But there are also in the New Testament, the books of James, the Hebrews, Jude and the enigmatic apocalypse, the Revelations of Saint John.

It appears that pluralism in and of faith traditions is a human given. The presence of the 'other' and the 'many' are constants in the human story even when it comes to divine revelation. It appears that for the human being religion is both personal and collective and all religions recognise this implicitly in their sacred texts, if not explicitly in worship or daily life. It therefore seems to me that some form of pluralism is inevitable in religion and will reflect itself in the family and other arrangements of societies whether it be synagogue, church, mosque or political party and, social club. Of course, it goes deeper than that. Faith affects how we think, formulate ideas and carry them out. Unless humankind is willing to develop compromises until an equilibrium and acceptance is achieved the future of the human race is in doubt.

Still there is hope. Recently, the Arab and Jewish Christians together with certain Muslims sat down to talk about peace. Mighty oaks grow from little acorns. Who knows what may grow from this!

The Rev. Dr. Horace O. Russell is senior pastor, Saints Memorial Baptist Church, Bryn Mawr nr. Philadelphia. He is a former president of the United Theological College of the West Indies. He may be reached at horussell@aol.com